Dressing for sexes

After
the Birth, what a family needs
Great tips for helping a family with a new baby.
Note that visiting time should be very limited -
five minutes may be too long.
Focus your time on doing dishes and the laundry.

by Jo Paoletti

Dare I say it? Maybe the clothes don't make the man. Sure,
clothing can create an image that influences a client or impresses an interviewer.
But can it actually make a man more masculine or a woman more feminine?
Ah, you say we don't believe clothing can do this? Join me in the infant's
department, where the world is divided into two distinct segments: pink
here, blue over there. The lines of gender are boldly drawn, with
kitties for her and puppies for him, and very, very few styles that could
be worn by both. Contrast this with the infant's section of The
Sears, Roebuck Catalogue of 1900. There you'll find no pink,
no blue, no baseball appliques or "Daddy's Little Girl" embroidery.
Babies back then wore white, period: white cambric dresses, white nainsook
slips, white flannel kimonos, and white cotton-pique coats. Boys
wore them as well as girls, and both had their share of lace, ruffles,
ribbons, and embroidery. What has happened since then to change the
way we dress our babies?

The practice of pink for girls and blue for boys was introduced into
the United States from France in the mid-19th century; in Little Women,
Amy tied a pink ribbon on Daisy, and a blue one on her twin, Demi, "French-style,
so you can always tell." But the practice was not common until after
World War II, partly because there was considerable disagreement about
which color was appropriate for which sex. The Infant's Department,
a trade journal, tried to settle the question in 1918: "There has been
a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted
rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that
pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for a boy,
while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl."

Clothing manufacturers complained that greeting-card companies were
confusing the issue by using pink for girls and blue for boys in birth
announcements. The greeting-card people pointed to Gainsborough's
"Blue Boy" and "Pinky" as proof they were right. The debate continued
for decades. in 1939, Parents magazine polled customers in
a New York department store and found that, while most preferred pink for
girls, about one-fifth favored blue for girls and pink for boys.
The first children to be consistently color-coded by gender were the post-war
baby boomers. Pink has been an exclusively feminine color for only
about 40 years. (This explains all the sweet, elderly ladies who
thought your son was a girl even when he was dressed all in blue.)

For centuries, boys wore dresses instead of trousers not only when they
were infants but also when they were as old as six or seven. During all
that time no one could think of a good reason that boys shouldn't wear
dresses. Then, in the 1890s, boys began wearing trousers earlier
and earlier. A new garment - the one-piece romper - was introduced
for toddlers and infants. At first, rompers were unisex, just like
baby dresses. But gradually our modern masculine and feminine rompers
evolved. By the 1930s there were distinct romper styles for girls
and boys, in addition to the unisex rompers. Dresses continued to
be worn by newborn boys until well after World War II. It wasn't until
1957 that Sears, Roebuck dropped the white baby dress from its unisex prepackaged
layette.

Despite the polarity of infants' clothing, children today are freer
of many of the sex-based distinctions that were common in 1900, or even
in 1960. Girls play baseball, and boys play with dolls. So
why aren't baby clothes more androgynous? Sex-differentiated clothes
may be more for the parents. Most adults expect to have gender information
provided, to the point of feeling uncomfortable or even annoyed if the
sex of a baby is not obvious.

In this liberated age, we don't like to admit it, but we believe that
clothing has the power to teach gender. Advocates of nonsexist childrearing
ardently believe that unisex clothing will teach children to be androgynous.
Traditionalists put their girls in ruffles and their boys in suit jackets
to teach them to be little ladies and gentlemen. Both groups react
with confusion when the girl wearing overalls begs for a frilly party dress
or when the little lady rips her pinafore while climbing a tree.
They needn't be so surprised. There is no proof, historical or psychological,
that clothing is as powerful as they think it is. When all American
children wore dresses from birth until they started school at age six or
seven, they grew up to be masculine and feminine in all the usual variations.
Gender differences are either innate, or they are much more complicated
than we think they are; my own inclination is to believe the latter.
And either way, it isn't the clothes that make the man.

Jo Paoletti teaches at the University of Maryland in College
Park and is currently working on a book about American children's clothes.

[Bibliography for Jo
Paoletti - includes "The Gendering of Infants' and Toddlers' Clothing
in America," in Katharine Martinez and Kenneth Ames, ed. The Material Culture
of Gender/ The Gender of Material Culture, (The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur
Museum, 1997.]

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